Today, Juan Willams thinks school integration matters. He even managed to write an editorial about the Little Rock Nine and how attending an integrated school changed their lives without mentioning you know, that big protest that 20,000 people attended somewhere in the South last week.

Integrated schools benefit students, especially minorities. Research on the long-term outcomes of black and Latino students attending integrated schools indicates that those students “complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools.”

That conclusion is reflected in the lives of the Little Rock Nine, who represent the black middle class that grew rapidly as better schools became open to black people during the 1960s and ’70s.

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The movement away from school integration is glaring. The Civil Rights Project found in 2003 that the nation’s 27 biggest school districts were “overwhelmingly” segregated with black and Latino students. Nationwide today, almost half of black and Latino children are in schools where less than 10 percent of the students are white. Those essentially segregated schools have a large percentage of low-income families and, according to researchers, “difficulty retaining highly qualified teachers.” Meanwhile, the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white and far more affluent than the schools for minority students.

This trend toward isolation of poor and minority students has consequences — half of black and Latino students now drop out of high school.

LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision.

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

He said modern school segregation could not account for all the disparities he now identifies it as being responsible for. In fact, he specifically said that segregation could not account for the school dropout rate of black and Latino students. Today, he laments the trend of their “isolation”.

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